Pacemaker authors.
37 I have taken the liberty of doing so, as
well as ‘zooming in’ on the pertinent part of the spectrum.
The vertical lines in figure 6 indicate the eccentricity,
obliquity, and precessional frequencies calculated by the
Pacemaker authors. The peaks align well with the vertical
lines, indicating good agreement between the results and
Milankovitch expectations (even though the last vertical
line does not pass directly through the centre of the C peak,
this can still be reasonably counted as a ‘hit’ for the theory).

Figure 7 shows the same δ18O power spectrum, but
after taking into account the revised age of 780 ka for the
B–M magnetic reversal boundary. The new time interval
corresponding to the PATCH ‘core’ extended from 0 to 544
ka. The vertical lines in figure 7 indicate the eccentricity,
obliquity, and precessional frequencies I calculated using
the B-T method and the astronomical data for the interval
0 to 544 ka.
38, 39

Note that the age revision has noticeably shifted
the locations of the smaller B and C peaks in figure 7
(corresponding to the obliquity and precession frequencies,
respectively) so that those peak frequencies no longer agree
with frequencies expected by the Milankovitch theory.

This age revision also shifts the results for the RC11-120
core and the bottom section of the E49-18 core.

Spectral analysis performed using all the data from the
E49-18 core (including the originally excluded section) also
yielded results that were generally in poor agreement with
Milankovitch expectations.
16

Verifying the results

Because these calculations require integral calculus and
a computer, laypeople may not have the technical expertise
to use the Blackman–Tukey method to verify these results.
Furthermore, those who do have the necessary expertise
may simply not have the time to check the results. Given the
potential importance of these results for geochronology and
the ‘climate change’ debate (discussed in a second paper), is
there a way that others can at least partially test them (which
we are enjoined to do in I Thessalonians 5: 21)?

Yes. First, one can easily verify both the old and newestimated ages for the MIS boundaries (table 1) using themethod shown in figure 4. Also, these new age estimatesintroduce an apparent cause-and-effect problem. Theoriginal MIS boundary age estimates (at least those for thetwelve most recent boundaries identified in the two IndianOcean cores) were reasonably close to tuned ages (secondcolumn from right in table 1) that were based on a simpleice model tied to summer insolation at 65° N 40: nearly allthe discrepancies between the two methods were less than
10 ka. However, after the age revision for the B–M reversalboundary, six of these twelve age estimates are now atleast 32 ka greater than expected, based on Milankovitchexpectations, and one (the MIS 12-11 boundary) is 67 kagreater than expected! This raises a question: how can theclimate be changing multiple tens of thousands of yearsbefore the changes in summer insolation that supposedlycaused the changes?

Likewise, one may use simple algebra and the two
SIMPLEX age control points within the RC11-120 core to
show that the original RC11-120 SIMPLEX ages (in ka), as
a function of depth (in metres), are given by

ageRC11-120 (original) = ( 28.864 ka/m) x depth ( 1)
Table 1. An assumed age of 700 ka for the Brunhes–Matuyama (B–M)
magnetic reversal boundary yields age estimates (third column from left)
for the MIS boundaries that are in reasonable agreement with ‘orbitally
tuned’ ages (second column from right), at least for the twelve most
recent MIS boundaries. However, the new age estimate of 780 ka for
this magnetic reversal causes many of the new age estimates (far right
column) to be multiple tens of thousands of years older than expected
based on Milankovitch expectations. The ‘tuned’ age estimates for the
MIS boundaries are from Lisiecki et al.
40